Digital payment company Itzcash has raised about Rs 800 crore from US-based EBix Inc, a Nasdaq-listed international supplier of on-demand software and e-commerce services to the insurance, financial, e-governance and healthcare companies. EBix has picked up about 80 per cent stake in the company.

With this, ItzCash's total funding since its inception is pegged at around Rs 1,200 crore and the company is now valued at Rs 1,000 crore.

The fresh funding also saw exits of ItzCash's early investors Matrix Partners and Intel Capital at about 3x to 5x returns, said the company's founder Navin Surya during an exclusive interaction with Hindu BusinessLine.

Surya further added that with a new strategic partner in place, ItzCash transforms into becoming a payment solutions exchange from a prepaid wallet and payment company.

Currently, ItzCash focuses on areas like payments, remittances and corporate solutions. Besides, it entered into the PoS solutions post demonetisation. However, with Ebix, it plans to foray into credit, insurance, healthcare and invesments.

"With the new funding in place, we plan to enter into new business areas and segments within the financial sector. Besides, we are planning to expand our reach both in India as well as to the countries where EBix has a presence," Surya said adding that the idea is to venture into Brazil to start with. Ebix is present in across 40 countries including Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, UK and US among others.

In India, ItzCash, which has an offline presence with about 75,000 outlets in over 3,000 cities, plans to scale up its outlets to about one lakh in this financial year. It has over 75 million customers and 1500 corporate clients.

With an omni-channel strategy, ItzCash claims to have a transaction success rate of 99 per cent for approximately Rs 14,000 crore in payment volume, the company processes approximately 600,000 transactions per day, said Surya, who founded the company in 2006.

The company had also recently announced that it has turned profitable at 35 per cent growth for the last 3 years and its revenues grew to Rs 240 crore in FY 17.

"We are the only profitable company in the payment space today. Besides, with new businesses and expansion, we expect to grow at 50-60 per cent CAGR for the next couple of years," said Bavik Vasa, CFO at ItzCash.

“With the youngest tech-savvy society, the largest middle class, a 1.3 billion population, a country committed to going digital and a growth rate of 7% plus, India is an emerging economic superpower today. We are big believers in the power of exchanges and thus have been keen to take an early position in India in terms of powering financial and insurance exchanges," said Ebix Chairman, President and CEO Robin Raina.